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by majormajor 1926 days ago
Do you think people hundreds of years ago with different common political views - some of which we'd find abhorrent now - had different faces too?

Someone should test this classifier on old images. Maybe it's just identifying fashion, not facial structure.

2 comments

A lot has changed, including nutrition. I would not be surprised if 17th century skeletons and body builds were observably different from the contemporary ones. In fact, at least height and weight of an average person is fairly different compared to the past.
And those are all non-genetic factors along the lines of other non-controversial things like "how wealthy you are will influence your political views," versus things supporting the "all political views are sacrosanct and can't be judged, because people can't help themselves" direction that 'plutonorm was suggesting.
No, what would change is that you'd get people from hundreds of years ago expressing conservatism or liberalism _for the time_. It's neither fashion nor facial structure, it's more or less intensity of facial scrunch vs. innocence, or wariness vs invitation. This is going to hold true for all humans and indeed for similar enough animals so long as they have the ability for comparable postures and expressions (dogs and cats would have the capacity for posture but I think dogs are more capable of brow expression/mobility, and of course monkeys and apes are close parallels to human expression)

So you could, in a limited sense, tell whether you've got a hippie cat or one who wants the hippies to get off its litterbox :) the latter will give you more side-eye, and more of a narrowed gaze.